The fork
function is the primitive for creating a process. It is declared in the header file unistd.h.
Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe plugin | AC-Unsafe lock | See POSIX Safety Concepts.
The fork
function creates a new process.
If the operation is successful, there are then both parent and child processes and both see fork
return, but with different values: it returns a value of 0
in the child process and returns the child’s process ID in the parent process.
If process creation failed, fork
returns a value of -1
in the parent process. The following errno
error conditions are defined for fork
:
EAGAIN
There aren’t enough system resources to create another process, or the user already has too many processes running. This means exceeding the RLIMIT_NPROC
resource limit, which can usually be increased; see Limiting Resource Usage.
ENOMEM
The process requires more space than the system can supply.
The specific attributes of the child process that differ from the parent process are:
Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | See POSIX Safety Concepts.
The _Fork
function is similar to fork
, but it does not invoke any callbacks registered with pthread_atfork
, nor does it reset any internal state or locks (such as the malloc
locks). In the new subprocess, only async-signal-safe functions may be called, such as dup2
or execve
.
The _Fork
function is an async-signal-safe replacement of fork
. It is a GNU extension.
Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe plugin | AC-Unsafe lock | See POSIX Safety Concepts.
The vfork
function is similar to fork
but on some systems it is more efficient; however, there are restrictions you must follow to use it safely.
While fork
makes a complete copy of the calling process’s address space and allows both the parent and child to execute independently, vfork
does not make this copy. Instead, the child process created with vfork
shares its parent’s address space until it calls _exit
or one of the exec
functions. In the meantime, the parent process suspends execution.
You must be very careful not to allow the child process created with vfork
to modify any global data or even local variables shared with the parent. Furthermore, the child process cannot return from (or do a long jump out of) the function that called vfork
! This would leave the parent process’s control information very confused. If in doubt, use fork
instead.
Some operating systems don’t really implement vfork
. The GNU C Library permits you to use vfork
on all systems, but actually executes fork
if vfork
isn’t available. If you follow the proper precautions for using vfork
, your program will still work even if the system uses fork
instead.
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